A Theme Song For Autumn

A Poem by Joshua & Taeleen

I trace memories of your smile in the sand

My house of small eternities

What is anything if it’s in a dark place?

My sight has gone silent

I have nothing to bounce off of

Like a mirror with no reflection

Like a breathing body without a shadow

My house of spurned hope

My heart of silk and lace

I feel the shape of your smile in the bend of my hand

Every moment a small eternity

In the darkness what is not seen does still breathe

A quiver in the silence

I give you nothing to bounce off of

Like a spirit with no apparition

I give you my silken heart but the blood has run out

This pen is my starlit hope

To raise a thread between our souls

When you wimper at night the wind moans through your sheets

These shadows are mine, this threadbare rope

Your heart and mine, not possessed yet owned

Whisper to me Sunday and promise me a Wednesday

These words lack meaning if they’re to prove our worth to each other

You are a theme song to autumn

Leaves and a sigh on high from an old oak tree shaped and sanded down

To cradle a new born sweetie pie

Hope is merely a guess or a whimsical desire for something to become greater

Damn the artist that gives in to coin over stroke

Damn the dancer that gives in to the fall and

Damn the swimmer who forgets how to float

The creator is fate and hope is a white rabbit

A rebel to form, a genie untrapped

The ecstasy of your sadness is a

Wind over the ocean where swimmers do float, but they are alien things

Lazy things, swallowing things, dancing

Bless the sinner who pirouettes underwater

The albatross gliding over the waves

To prove our worth to each other

You are a theme song to autumn

Our tree is the oaken firmament

Hung with stars, born of a star

We follow a trail into a hole, follow hope

Of a world without sales calls

Where time is a gift, funereal night

Static darkness, infinite light

Colors of weeds, lush gardens, soiled knees

Hesitant in this midnight morning

Images in this sleep when I find you

I breathe like moonlight through your window

If you close your eyes the ground beneath your back breathes.  The blades of grass curl around you.  Desperate to hold you.

Little bugs and insects gather near the warmth of your body.  This scary giant.  They circle you.

Stay there, stay present and dream of the future!  Do your travels offer you space and laughter?  Grace and delicacy?  Where have you gone to?  Your body is still so close . . .

You have ascended this place.

Tell me where you’ve gone to.  I’m so curious to know.  What moves you?  Where have you been since last Sunday?  I wish you’d speak.  I’ll speak back.  Just please lay and breathe.  Let me feel you breathe.

With me, with me

Overstimulated eyes

I have rain and fog for you

Enriched moisture

Hurting heart

I have ocean waves and wind song for you

Soul soothing

Aching body

I have all sorts of grassy fields, lakes and ponds

Eager to hold you

Moving mind

I have furry creatures desperate for a caring mind

Calming bonds stop time

I assure you it’s all here.  Everything you could ever dream.  I have it.

It is me

I am your mother

You are my child

Rest in the valley

–undistracted—

My baby’s breath

And love on

High

Come back to me

You’re right my dear, between Sundays I am a whore for light, don’t fear. I sell stardust to the lowest offer, lay my magics down in humble coffers, drive my fingers into the mud for common jewels, light my eyes with the curves of these beautiful fools.

Is that what you imagine?

Is there no other way?  A slave to beauty in this modern day?

Nay.

On Monday I am the leaf in mourning.  Golden brown, iridescent and ignored.  Leaves like the seconds of eternity.

Tuesday comes and I fly.  What is a wind but a metaphor for life?  We are invisible rivers.  Dancing invisible rivers.

Names of days have no meaning to the dust in the light, and I am a forest so much as a leaf.  I am a shore if I am a grain of sand.

Yet the process repeats, whorls in our flow.

Wednesday I am clutched in the beak of a bird.  I know its grace, in imperfections,

So when Thursday finds me in a nest I do not fear, and when Friday lays it bare

In the cold winter white

Dead for birdlings that have grown

Flown                                  Gone

I know that I am a breed for Saturdays

Given to seed, inside soft and green

And there is no form to this seven-stanzaed verse, no cage in this rhyme

But time folding into time

And nature blooming in you and me

These Sundays, as you call them, neither end nor begin, these seconds of eternity.

You are my shore, if ever a grain of sand

If we are a forest, first we are a tree

I’m thinking of you.  I’m remembering the small

Corners I’ve been and how I thought so

Convinced that nothing would ever change

How silly.

Have we the power to shape and mold?

Are we all artists?

I can’t understand.

We are the dust.

Inevitably to be blown off

The words said by

The lips of our unborn.

Why?  Why can’t I live and love

Or try forever?

Flown…                              Gone…

Oh baby. 1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6. 7.  Oh baby oh. .  .

Have we the power to stop time?

I feel with you we have managed to still it.

Stay close.

Leland.

The gringling grind chips at my

Heart and the

Roadkill rabbits are

Circling this city.

Can you breathe

For the two of us?

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